Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein has called on the Israeli government to formally recognise the Armenian genocide.

"It is no secret that Israel has taken an ambivalent position about the genocide," Mr Edelstein said, calling Israel's reaction "too hesitant and too restrained… Israel must re-evaluate the criteria for its position, since none of us can change the history".

With her city's Jews still reeling after the Hyper Cacher supermarket murders in January, the Mayor of Paris gave an impassioned speech in Jerusalem this week on her determination to fight antisemitism.

Anne Hidalgo did not limit herself to general statements, but also addressed the thorny topic of whether opposition to Israel is sometimes used to obscure Jew-hatred.

Seven weeks since the elections, on Wednesday afternoon, the Knesset removed the final obstacle to Benjamin Netanyahu's fourth government when it narrowly passed an amendment that allowed him to appoint more than 18 ministers to his new cabinet.

During last summer’s Gaza war, David Cameron stood firm in his support of Israel’s right to defend itself from terror. And that was despite being in coalition with the LibDems, whose then leader, Nick Clegg, and Vince Cable both raced to join the anti-Israel bandwagon. Now, of course, Mr Cameron is governing on his own.

A court has found that Andrey Adamovsky, vice president of the World Jewish Congress, defrauded former business partners to the tune of $34.7 million (£22.3m).

A civil court judge handed down the verdict last October, but Mr Adamovsky, who was found to have illicitly deprived two co-owners of his Oledo Petroleum company of their 45 per cent share of its sale, has not yet paid them back.

Many years ago while working on a newspaper story in Germany, I attended a Friday-night service at a synagogue in Munich. The elderly rabbi was a Holocaust survivor who had returned to the city of his birth after Dachau camp was liberated and I kept looking at him and wondering why?